Introduction: Marxism-Leninism and Global Change

Abstract

The radical changes that have taken place in the global political landscape in general and in that of the Asia-Pacific region in particular in the past few years have challenged many established assumptions about political developments and international relations. The development of Vietnam’s political thinking in response to these changes is extremely interesting in this respect. This book deals with Vietnam’s international relations and foreign policy from the end of the Second Indochina War, in the spring of 1975, to the beginning of the 1990s from the point of view of Vietnamese political doctrine. The fall of Saigon and the defeat of the United States in Indochina in the spring of 1975 marked the high tide of “the world revolutionary forces” and in the influence of Soviet global foreign policy. By 1993, however, the two camps structure had been demolished, the radical Third World movement had simmered down, and the Asia-Pacific region was boosting its status in the global framework. Nevertheless, although the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist state systems in East Europe have collapsed, totalitarian Marxist state systems have maintained at least their façades in the Far East, North Korea, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Laos and Vietnam up to the 1990s.